21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic (Updated

2014)
Content Marketing
The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and
may not always reflect the views of Moz.

It's easy to build a blog, but hard to build a successful blog with significant
traffic. Over the years, we've grown the Moz blog to nearly a million visits each
month and helped lots of other blogs, too. I launched a personal blog late last
year and was amazed to see how quickly it gained thousands of visits to each
post. There's an art to increasing a blog's traffic, and given that we seem to
have stumbled on some of that knowledge, I felt it compulsory to give back by
sharing what we've observed.

NOTE: This post replaces a popular one I wrote on the same topic in 2007
(and updated again in 2012). This post is intended to be useful to all forms of
bloggers - independent folks, those seeking to monetize, and marketing
professionals working an in-house blog from tiny startups to huge companies.
Not all of the tactics will work for everyone, but at least some of these should
be applicable and useful.

#1 - Target Your Content to an Audience Likely to

Share
When strategizing about who you're writing for, consider that audience's ability
to help spread the word. Some readers will naturally be more or less active in
evangelizing the work you do, but particular communities, topics, writing styles
and content types regularly play better than others on the web. For example,
great infographics that strike a chord ( like this one), beautiful videos that tell a
story (like this one) and remarkable collections of facts that challenge
common assumptions (like this one) are all targeted at audiences likely to
share (geeks with facial hair, those interested in weight loss and those with
political thoughts about macroeconomics respectively).